Dear Google, I understand that one might feel sometimes the urge to rock the boat. That’s OK. google+ did not hurt. The black top bar is fine. Google Reader is a bit of a different story. But I’ll manage. But, please, please, pretty please: DO NOT let those people anywhere near gmail.

Just keep it working. As it is. It is great. No need for social features. No need for Buzz/Wave/whatever-you-fancy.

I’d be happy to give you even more money for it. Just don’t mess with it.

Naturally my son wanted his own computer. He is 11 so isn’t it a birth right to have one? I only pointed to a stack of parts, being left overs from some upgrades and told that he could have one if we can put it together himself. He looked and me with this “Dad, I love you, but wtf is wrong with you + and what on earth have I done to deserve to be treated like this” look. He actually said “But I am eleven years old”. My reply was “yes, you are eleven years old”.

After a couple of days he realized that that I was serious about what I had said. Funny, since the previous 11 years might have given him a hint about that one. So he got the parts out. Had a good look at them, connected them in a way that made sense, connected them wrong, cursed, cried (of course not), asked questions and he ended up with:

I gave him a hand to put things in a case and everybody was happy.

But wait, there is the Internet, there is an eleven year old boy. An awesome one. But still!
I have not seen any software that would be able to protect my child from all the rotten stuff that is a couple clicks away on the internet.
The solution that we came up with works better I think. I explained my worries to him. He understood. I asked him if it would be
OK if I would look at where he goes at the net. He had no issues with that. Since Firefox stores visited URLs in sqlite and he
naturally runs an ubuntu machine this was easy to do. Each day that he used his computer I get an email from it that shows me
what he has been up to. He is totally aware of that and does not mind at all. And I never had anything to worry about.

Today was the first time that I saw in the end of such an email:

Which helps me quiet a great deal in what I have to do. Nice to see gmail getting better. With Buzz and Wave being what they are it became en vogue to bash google. It is nice to see that they continue to add nice features as well.

Which happened to bring them high in the google search results for “facebook login”.

Then facebook did a re design. I didn’t notice much difference. But some people got confused and looked for the “facebook login” on google. And as we all know
clicking on the first result is what one should do (not). Enough people were so convinced that what they actually saw was facebook they got very mad and left comments in this direction.

Two things become apparent:

Everybody has computers now. And I mean everybody.
And many people delegate everything (including their thinking) to google.

Over the last years I accumulated quiet a bit of mail in Gmail. It works, and I find it very inspiring to see its features grow while I keep all my data. But I also grew worried: What would happen if my mail should go away? I have paid google exactly zero for keeping all my email. There would be nothing I could do.

Turns out that it is possible to make a copy. Googles own Matt Cutts described it well

And it would do so repeatedly with the same number. I assumed that something had gone awry with those mails. After pretending that the mail already had been retrieved via the oldmail-imap file getmail soldiered on.

Tragically at some point my connection went away. I had downloaded around 120,000 mails during that session.
Getmail updates the oldmail-imap file only when done (or cancelled via ctrl-C). So the next time it started I went to download the same mails again.

Even with that glitch things worked out. And I feel pretty good about having a copy of my mail now.

I have a couple Google Voice invites left. So far it has been working amazing. For instance do we route our 24/7 support number through it, and forward it to different people depending on the time of the day. That way people are awake when they answer. Google Voice has numerous other nice features. And best of all, they work very reliably.

The question is provocative, the underlying mechanism interesting. His conclusions seem predictive and not very helpful I am afraid. Reading the title I hoped for the wrong article. One that would illuminate and much more interesting question: “How does google change the way we think”. It certainly does. I am amazed how quickly I find myself forgetting things. It was worrying at first. After all I make a living based on the application of knowledge. The foundation of knowledge was being able to remember things. I say was. And -actually- I think it is quiet ok.

The apparent loss of memory was frightening when I observed how I would google for things again and again. The nicest anecdote I mention frequently: Reading my own blog without noticing that I am fixing an issue following a recipe that I wrote myself.

Nowadays I think that my brain just realized that it is a waste of time to compete with the internet and google as it’s access if it comes to all those mundane details that make up my job. Once a decent phone book function comes along (be it as a book or function of the phones software) we quickly forget most numbers we used to be able to remember. Just how it goes.

Google mail seemed to have gotten a facelift a few weeks ago. But it also got more functionalities. Of the nice kind: I was working on an email exchange with a couple of people just now. While typing along there was all of a sudden a yellow message in the lower right corner. It informed me that somebody had added a message to the thread I was writing in. It’s this kind of helpful idea and feature that makes gmail the best mail app around these days. Very impressive.

Just got an email back that I had send. Or should we say that I supposedly sent. No, I have not switched to Windows and are victim of the usual malware. No I don’t think that just because somebody has put in my email address in the “From:” field that I have sent it. What just happened is much much scarier:

Only the tail of my email was what I sent. The start was spam. I send this email with gmail to somebody that uses SBC or pacbell and is pretty sure on a mac as well. If my email get mixed up with spam then they certainly have a hard time getting delivered.

Which is the scariest part of the whole story: I still assume that email works. I send something once, and if I don’t hear back then I do not bother people again. Which is a good way of communicating, as long god damn email works.

Didn’t google try their own video thing? If you have it, then you can pay 1.6 billion for making your own solution worse than the one coming out of a garage somewhere. The only problem is, that once you start doing this you loose the edge. Gmail was the last thing that google did that really worked. Search is still of amazing quality for them. Maps is decent,
but video they screwed up, and now they pay the equivalent of the GDP of Mongolia for their mistake. OK almost, that one is 1885 Millions.

is the URL you want to use in order to teach google NOT to show you the localized Version that they throw at you based on your IP. I had removed all my google cookies and was faced with the devastating fact that I rank at #15 or so for my own name on the german gogole version.

It took me a while to be the ‘#1 result’ results when somebody enters my complete name in google. I look at the results page for this once in a while. Since I know the usual order of the pages by heart, it makes a great indicator if something changed at google. This morning I saw a pretty nasty bug:

As you can see my blog agregator BlogsNow contains the wrong “snippet”. It does not produce compelling effects. This snippet is actually one that comes from the result above it. In this case it’s not that tragic, since the result above is still related to me: It’s my former job. But the same might happen to two sites that have controversial views on a topic.

Things break. Google code is not immune to this. The bigger question is, if and when it gets fixed.

As much as I like a free thing that works mostly. Today google over did it:

I understand their urge for more money ( they are only worth billions by now) so they like to peddle their “google talk service”. At first I was mildly shocked when I had to click through their “there is google talk” banner page in order to get to my emails. I thought that would be it and I had gmail for years, so once a year one screen to click away is ok.

But now they draw a little overlay over every email address that the mouse is hovering over. How annoying is that!
If they don’t shut that of soon ( I looked in the preferences and it seemed there was no way to do that ) then I will get my imap install going on andreaswacker.com. Or maybe google does not like to store 1038 MB worth of email for me anymore and they like to annoy me so that I go away? Either way, if this nonsense does not stop soon then I will migrate my mail over to my server again. That will be an interesting ‘pop3′ session: 1GB of email …

update 2/17/06: google stoppped displaying those pesky overlays. Glad about that.
Don’t really have the time right now to get imap going on my own domain.

In December 2005 Google handled an average of 924 searches a second. It was 528/sec a year before. Every search is done against the content of some eight billion documents or so. I think that is rather impressive. All done on Linux machines.

When I was digging for those Ballmer quotes I read a couple of articles about Microsoft and search. They had the tone as if Microsoft and the world was taken by surprise by the success of search. It sometimes sounds as if search came out of nowhere. I think Microsoft decided consiously not to pay attention to search around 2000 when it should have. They probably underestimated the value that is out there on the internet in this uncontrollable heap of information and tools. Microsoft owns the PC operating system and office software market. They simply assumed that all the valuable content would be created within their domain. Therefor they would just need to go along, release a nice pace of updates for Office, Entourage and Windows and that would be that. The internet, so they thought, is something you browse for entertainment with IE in the lunch break. They won the browser war, so what could happen to them?

As confident as the Armada did they sail into this century. And they are sinking as fast as those spanish ships did 418 years ago. Their stock price is flat. They share with Sony the grief about not being part of the booming mp3 business. Longhorn is called Vista now. It’s ok, but the excitement is largely missing. Google just started the next phase of competition by replacing the functionality of Exchange with a free service of theirs. As a little side node here: Web pundits had speculated in vivid colors how there would be a web based word or excel product to challenge the dominating products made in Seattle. Of course it makes so much more sense to start with Microsoft Exchange. Email is, after all, already a network based system. So much for the collective wisdom of crowds.

Microsoft never anticipated that there could be a whole new use of computers that would have nothing to do with writing texts or doing spreadsheats. Microsoft got their lucky break from the lack of imagination and enthousiasm at IBM when it created the personal computer. Only few years of big blue being asleep at the steering wheel, gave Bill and his people enough time to become leader in this emerging field. And they made all the right moves to stay ahead of the game since then. The PC OS market has been domimated by Microsoft very much like IBM had been sucessfully leading the computation field before. IBM could not imagine that the PC that they started would change everything. Nor could Microsoft imagine that the internet would do it all over again.

Imagination is not very tangible. It’s lack however can cost you billions. And somehow it always does.

I don’t get it they must be too smart for me. I can not see how this would be anything that google would be doing and why this makes any sense.

—

On the other hand this makes allot of sense
Imagine you are a small company: You pay some MS Exchange Expert and Microsoft quiet some money just to have email. Most features you would want you might get for free via “caribou”. Or for very little money.

I think it would make sense if the service is free. Eyeballs pay for it. Support could cost money. Putting ads in
outgoing email would be a big ‘nono’. Being a small company you don’t want to expose that you use a cheap/free service for email.

I followed the whole google china thing and was not upset that much. I did expect google to behave like this.
But a press release like this in a blog is just too much. That’s calling everybody to drink the cool-aid. Some people will do.
I will not. Google is a big and greedy corporation. They make billions right now. They could have afforded the high route, and they choose deliberate not too. Instead they come up with a phony press release. All those smart people they hired in the last years will not leave. Their stock options will keep them. But this marks the time when google stopped being cool. I think that google is evil.

Google censors it’s results in China. Lately I have been googling allot for a current project. Installing things on linux machines means that you have to have access to all those how-to’s boards forums. Allot of linux technology exists in China and everywhere in the third world. How about calling the next redhat release not ‘tettnang’ but rather ‘democracy’. Or sprinkle those ‘bad words’ in your source code. Everybody who will filter would cut himself of a significant amount of information. The chinese boom is fueled by technological information available so freely. By merging ‘bad terms’ into the things they need to read you essentially break filtering. No matter how eagerly google will comply: Either you censor and loose lots of information for your business or you give up on the censor stuff and deal with the realities of history. Their choice really.

Right now the chinese have the cake (free information on technology) and eat it too (cencorship)